


a distraction that escalates

by a_gay_poster



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst with a Smutty Ending, Blow Jobs, Burns, Canon-Typical Violence, First Kiss, First Time, Frottage, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Prompt Fill, hand trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:28:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27455758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/pseuds/a_gay_poster
Summary: The seventh gate isn’t strictly lethal the way the eighth gate is, but there’s a reason they call it the Gate of Shock.
Relationships: Gaara/Rock Lee
Comments: 97
Kudos: 324





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a smut prompt fill on Tumblr. The prompt was: "if youd like, something where theyre trying to take each others mind off a painful injury? a distraction that escalates. the concept of giving/seeking comfort that becomes urgent is adorable to me."
> 
> I haven't quite decided how I want to divide this up yet, but it will have between three and five parts. Please mind the tags on this one.

The seventh gate isn’t strictly lethal the way the eighth gate is, but there’s a reason they call it the Gate of Shock. 

Lee can feel his consciousness fading, aware only of the slowing pace of the blood pounding in his ears, the thin arms around him. The sun overhead is hot, but his skin is hotter, bright red and still misty with fizzing chakra seeping through his pores. 

He can hear Gai-sensei’s words in his ears: “It’s not just the Gate of Death you need to be worried about. Any of the gates bring with them the risk of death if the body isn’t allowed to recover from their effects, Lee.”

_Lee … Lee … Lee …_

“Lee!” A small hand shakes his shoulder. The pain that rockets through him at that slight movement is indescribable, each shredded muscle protesting. 

Lee blinks once, twice. Even the brush of his lashes against his chakra-singed cheeks burns. He tries to clear his mind, to focus on that voice.

“Lee, don’t you dare fall asleep.” The voice is little more than a harsh whisper, like the hiss of sand carried on the wind. 

It’s Gaara. Gaara is here, his small body propping Lee’s up, his thin fingers on Lee’s shoulder. Every last point of contact is excruciating. 

There’s not enough energy in Lee to raise his voice and tell him it hurts. 

But Gaara is talking to him. Gaara is moving and holding him. 

There’s a faint shadow above. Lee squints up to discover they’re beneath a stone outcropping, just barely sheltered from the sun. The ground beneath Lee’s bare calves is dry and smooth. Where are his weights, his legwarmers? His jumpsuit has been roughly torn through at the knees.

When did they move? How did they get here? He must have passed out. 

But if Gaara moved them both, that means Gaara is safe. That means Lee’s gambit worked. That means the man in the Akatsuki cloak—who should not, _could not_ have been an Akatsuki at all—is dead or incapacitated. 

Lee’s left arm and leg hurt worse than the rest of him. Those old wounds. He dimly recalls his left hand punching through the man’s sternum and out the other side, an explosion of blood and tissue. A kick that detached a many-fanged, curse-seal-flecked head. A final fountain of water from the stump of the man’s neck. A sand shield that appeared in front of him and melted away under the onslaught. 

Lee hopes what he saw wasn’t just another water clone. There were so many—too many—for the middle of the desert. 

A rough hand brushes Lee’s hair back from his forehead, faintly shining even in the shadows. Lee winces from the texture of Gaara’s Sand Armor. 

There’s a hiss; the hand goes transparent and fissures. A cracking sound. The armor turns to glass and shatters to the desert floor around them. 

Fortunately for them both, there’s enough sand around for Gaara to replace it quickly. Lee can feel it surging and regenerating beneath the few places they’re touching: his shoulders, his lower back, the back of his lolling head. 

“Stay awake this time.” Gaara’s voice is gravel-rough. “I can’t move us any further without leaving you. Even without your weights, keeping the armor intact is sapping all my chakra.” 

Lee nods. Or he imagines he nods. He hopes he nods. 

He should tell Gaara to leave him. To protect himself and go find help. Lee will try to hang on. 

“Don’t,” Gaara says sharply. Lee isn’t sure if he’s spoken. “I’m not leaving. You’re barely conscious. If that man had back-up, you won’t be able to defend yourself.”

Lee doubts the enemy nin had back-up. He had powerful jutsu, rare for the desert, sure. But in the end he was nothing more than a child playing dress-up. The fabric of his robe tore like cheap synthetic. The red clouds, Lee noted when he was up close, were printed backwards. 

What a shame, what a disgrace, to have fallen to such a man—more a boy, really. Lee has always planned on dying young, but he had hoped the circumstances would be more splendid.

They were not expecting the attack when it came. They were only out in the desert for a friendly stroll, one that had gone on far too long, had taken them too far from Suna’s borders. That was no excuse, though. A shinobi should always be on his guard. 

It’s just that Gaara could be so distracting, so beguiling.

If he survives this, Lee swears he’ll never let himself be distracted again. 

Because Gaara being in danger—seeing him weak and bedraggled with water, struggling to hold his sand together to mount a counter-attack—lit a panicked fire in Lee. He tore through the first four gates without even thinking. 

His weakness then was obvious. 

The man in the fake Akatsuki cloak aimed for Gaara again and again with water attacks in dizzying combinations. Water darts that pierced the sand shield, ropes that moved like tentacles and pulled Gaara’s footing out from beneath him, silvery cerulean dragons with lifelike teeth that gnashed and crushed and fell in unrelenting waves. Their little patch of desert, sandwiched between two mesas, quickly became as muddy as a swamp. Gaara siphoned the smallest amount of dry sand to lift them into the air, but Lee jumped down to rejoin the fray. 

Lee thought the man would surely run out of water soon, but he was wrong. Upon unlocking his cursed seal, the man’s water source became infinite. Internal, possibly, drawing on the water in his own cells, or wicking moisture from the scant clouds above and the dry air around. 

In the end, the source didn’t matter. The man’s single-minded focus on the Kazekage enraged Lee, drove him plowing through the fifth and sixth gates, body hotter, legs faster. The flaming fists of a Morning Peacock burst bright in the air, only to be stifled into steam and smoke. 

Black curse marks crawled the man’s body like writhing, living things. The saturated ground surged up from the man’s fists plowing into the ground and knocked against Gaara’s tiny platform.

Gaara fell.

The seventh gate snapped open in Lee like a bowstring, quite without thought. His skin was so hot the water turned to mist upon contact, allowing him to reach his opponent in close combat. Even the spray of the enemy nin’s blood as Lee dispatched him turned to steam. 

Yes, Lee wanted a splendid death. Though what could be more splendid, more noble, than dying for one’s precious person?

Rough fingers tug at his eyelids once more, turn smooth, shatter. Lee clenches his eyes against the spray of glass, unable to move to turn his head away. 

“Stay _awake_ ,” Gaara growls. “I thought I’d lost you when you collapsed. How many gates was that?”

 _Seven,_ Lee mouths, though he doesn’t hear the words. 

He opens his eyes in time to see Gaara’s go wide. His pale lips moving, bloodless, soundless. _Seven._

There’s another name for the seventh gate. The Gate of Wonder. The state of grace between death and life, a waking dream. 

Lee doesn’t hurt anymore. That’s probably a bad sign, a sign that his mind is losing its grip on his body. 

At least Gaara is close. Gaara is safe and he’s holding him. Lee protected him. He protected his most precious person.

His tear ducts are too hot and swollen to cry. There’s no more moisture left in his body. The telltale blue sweat of the seventh gate is evaporating, disappearing into the air. 

“Someone will come soon,” Gaara is saying, as if trying to convince himself. “We’ve been gone too long. My ANBU will start to worry.” 

Gaara’s ANBU tried to tail him out of the village, Lee remembers. He recalls the dismissive flicking of Gaara’s wrist as they passed the gates. The snapped exhortation in Sunan when the guards hesitated. A brief, pitched argument that Lee understood not a word of, which ended in them walking out into the desert alone. 

If they make it out of here, Gaara’s ANBU will probably never let him out of their sight again. 

Lee hopes it’s only the dreamlike aftereffects of the gate causing him to see tears in Gaara’s eyes. One falls and turns to steam before it even touches his skin. Gaara’s lips are moving without words, the same shapes over and over in the hollows of his softly parted lips. Reassurances or prayers. 

“Just stay with me,” Gaara’s murmuring. “I promise I’ll take care of you. I swear. Just _stay_.” 

Lee wonders—

Well. Why not? 

It’s an impossible, Herculean effort to force his vocal cords to vibrate. Worse than chakra gate training. More difficult even than saying goodbye at the end of a mission in Wind Country. 

“Gaara-kun …” 

“Lee?” His voice is choked. Lee’s vision is blacking at the edges, phosphenes dancing white as snow across the center of his sight, which is filled with only Gaara. His red hair frizzing around his head like a halo, dried by the gate’s heat. His wide, worried eyes. 

The question seems to take forever to crawl its way from Lee’s lungs to his lips. Nearly long enough for him to have second thoughts. 

If the answer is no, Lee won’t be around long to feel the sting of that rejection. And if the answer is yes … It would be the best possible final memory. The best possible final dream. 

Lee can’t be sure he isn’t dreaming right this second.

“... will you kiss me?” 

The response doesn’t come in words. A fracture works its way across Gaara’s face. Then two, then three. The sand armor crackles and shuffs as it falls to the ground. 

Lee tries so, so hard to focus, even as his field of vision narrows. He’s seeing Gaara’s bare skin for the first time. The marks around his eyes are more than jinchuuriki scarring, more than matte black rings; they’re bruise-dark, mottled grey and blue and purple, and freckled with burst blood vessels. He leans closer, and his eyes aren’t clear green either, but rather patterned, scaled like a Luna moth’s wings and just as captivating. His lips are just the faintest shade darker than the rest of his pale skin, the color of eroded sandstone. He’s so close that Lee can see the pores of his skin, the faint blondish hairs of his sparse eyebrows, the raised edges of the scarlet mark on his forehead.

Oh, even if he says ‘no’ right now, this will be the perfect last memory. 

Lee’s heart aches like he might as well have opened the eighth gate after all. 

The very last thing Lee remembers is a soft, soft palm cupping his cheek, the press of cool lips to his.

A hiss of pain.

Then darkness.

* * *


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Looked at this today and figured, "Hey, why not?" 
> 
> Settled on five chapters for the best way to break this out, so more to come!

When Lee awakes it’s to the sound of familiar, mechanical beeping; to the shuffle of soft-soled shoes in distant hallways and steady, nearby breathing. He struggles towards consciousness like clawing his way through mud. 

The well-known stickiness of medical tape and electrodes tugs at his skin. Something pleasantly cool is seeping into his veins from the tender inside of his elbow. He tests the weight of his eyelids. The breathing to his right goes jagged. The sheets beneath his limp arm wrinkle.

“Lee?”

He turns his head. The joints of his jaw, neck, shoulders, elbows, ribs, hips, ankles ache. But the pain is dull, distant. The sheets are smooth on his skin. 

“Lee?” The voice raises, urgent. A hand fumbles with his fingers, its presence only noted once it begins to move.

Oh. Someone’s been holding his hand.

He squeezes his fingers against it. How nice it is to have a bedside visitor. Back in Konoha, Sakura never lets him have visitors for the first few days after he’s done something reckless. She says it’s to teach him a lesson.

But he’s not in Konoha.

And he’s done something very reckless indeed. 

_Several_ very reckless somethings. 

He wrenches open his eyes. 

Gaara is leaning over Lee’s hospital bed. The hand that isn’t twined with Lee’s fingers is twisted in the bedsheet. His eyes are massive, searching. 

“Lee? Are you awake?”

He’s not wearing his sand armor, Lee notices dimly. His eyes are that shifting, scaled teal, darting over Lee’s face. The entire world seems foggy and distant beyond the pressure of Gaara’s hand. Lee wonders if he’s still dreaming, if he’s comatose out in the desert dreaming an afterlife where Gaara kissed him, where Gaara kept a vigil at his bedside until he woke. How much control might he have over such a dream, he wonders. Could he dream another kiss?

His eyes drop to Gaara’s lips. 

His mouth is shiny pink, the skin of his lips flat and flaking white and cracked in the corners. It takes a moment before Lee remembers that that’s not the way they looked back in the desert, where they were sandstone pale and softly ridged. He looks as if he’s been burned.

He _has_ been burned.

Awareness floods Lee like a shot of adrenaline straight in the thigh.

He scrambles upright. 

“Gaara-kun?” The machines at his bedside start making a horrible racket. 

Small hands press him back to the bed. A body braces over his. 

Gaara has hopped up and is now crouched atop him on the bed, holding him down.

“Lie _down_ ,” Gaara hisses, hovering over him on all fours. “You’re still recovering.”

As soon as Lee goes limp against the mattress, Gaara’s hands release him. But he doesn’t climb off Lee. 

“Did we—?” Lee says weakly. He doesn’t even know what he means to ask. _Did we survive? Did we take out all the enemies? Did we really kiss?_

Gaara interprets it as the former. 

“My ANBU found us shortly after you fell unconscious. They became suspicious when you were running late for your afternoon training session.”

“So we’re safe?” Lee’s head lolls. The machine attached to the line in his arm beeps shrilly. A flush of cool liquid races through him.

“For now.” Gaara’s eyes flick to the door. “We still don’t know where the assailant came from or what his motives were. Or why he was dressed as an Akatsuki member.”

“It was fake,” Lee mumbles. 

“Hmm?” 

“The cloak. It was fake. Like a knock-off.” The whole world feels cottony, like the rough batting stuffed into a bedroll. 

Gaara’s bright eyes search Lee’s face. He’s so close. If Lee’s head weren’t so heavy, he’d lift it and try to kiss him again. Would Gaara let him, now that he’s not dying? 

“I’ll let Kankuro know. He’s investigating the assassination attempt.” 

Something medical-white and clumsy brushes Lee’s salt-tacky hair from his eyes. Aside from being stuck in bed, the worst part of being in a hospital is not having access to his own shampoo. The dry stuff the nurses rub into patients’ hair to keep them from getting sores just doesn’t quite clean right. 

“You’re lucky Haruno Sakura taught that seminar on healing gate damage last month,” Gaara murmurs. That thick white object bumps Lee’s cheek, the corner of his mouth. Bandages? “The doctor said your injuries were the most extensive she’s seen.”

Lee turns to squint at it, traces its terminus up the line of Gaara’s arm to his shoulder. 

That clumsy, bandaged thing is Gaara’s _hand_. 

Lee has never seen Gaara with so much as a plaster from a papercut. What sort of wound could be underneath those wrappings, bad enough that it needed to be bandaged even with Gaara’s accelerated healing? Lee remembers the pressure of five small fingers on the side of his burning face, a cool palm. 

The icy hand of guilt claws back the foggy curtain of the drugs. 

“Does it hurt?” Lee blurts.

“Hm?” Gaara’s eyes follow the trail of Lee’s gaze to the thickly wrapped bundle jutting awkwardly from his wrist. “Oh. Yes. Terribly. The palm is one big blister.”

“I’m so _sorry_.” Lee’s eyes well up with tears. 

“Hush.” 

Gaara bends down and kisses both his cheeks. Each of his clenched-shut eyelids. The corner of Lee’s mouth. 

The tears evaporate in shock. 

Lee is certain he must be dreaming, but he turns his head anyway, chases the full of Gaara’s lips. The texture of Gaara’s mouth is different this time, the skin tightly stretched and scar-smooth. 

Gaara bends down and braces on his elbows, still not putting any weight on Lee. His unbandaged hand makes a fist in Lee’s pillowcase. He kisses clumsily, like he doesn’t quite know what kissing is, just press after press after press of his lips against Lee’s. His burnt, burst-blister-skinned lips. The lips that Lee ruined in his selfishness. 

Lee should stop. He should turn away and do the noble thing and apologize again and again and again until he’s worthy of Gaara’s affection. Which may be never. How can he make up for—for—

Before he can move, Gaara jerks back.

Lee’s heart clenches, but he knows he deserves this. Gaara’s coming to his senses as he absolutely should be, realizing the abhorrence of Lee’s actions. 

It hurts nonetheless.

Gaara sits back on his heels, suddenly alert. His skin crackles with ozone that makes the few unburnt hairs on Lee’s arms stand on end. Lee fumbles to grab for his own face with a complete lack of logic. His eyebrows are still intact. He nearly sighs in relief.

“Someone’s coming.” Gaara’s hunched like an animal over Lee’s thighs, elbows on his knees, eyes on the door.

“An enemy?” Lee goes tense all over again. He can’t sense any chakra signature beyond the massive one rolling over his entire body like a living cocoon. 

“No.” But Gaara jumps down onto the floor anyway, crouched with his good hand on his gourd like he intends to strike at the slightest provocation.

The door swings open.

“Kazekage-sama? The call light was on, but you hadn’t sent a clone down to the nurse’s station, so I thought—” There’s a nurse standing in the open doorway, her white uniform crisply pressed, craned up on the balls of her feet in her soft-bottomed shoes. “Ah, Lee-san, you’re awake.”

Gaara relaxes only fractionally, stepping aside just enough to permit her entry into the room. Lee still can’t sense her chakra, with the way Gaara’s seems to fill the whole room. 

The nurse bustles over to his bedside and tinkers with the machine. The beeping falls blissfully silent. She’s all professionalism, unsmiling in the way of most Suna nin as she charts down the vitals on his monitor. But when she looks at Lee, her eyes soften. 

“We hoped you might wake up today, with how they’ve been lowering your medication dosage.”

Gaara seems to loom out of nowhere, suddenly between her and Lee’s bed, uncomfortably close.

“No one mentioned that to me.”

She stiffens. “Well, ah—Kazekage-sama, that is … We didn’t want to get your hopes up.” 

Gaara narrows his eyes at her. The tension in the room rises. The stale hospital air now smells like the wind just before a storm. 

Lee fakes a cough. 

Two heads snap to look at him.

“Are you thirsty?” Gaara cuts his eyes to the quavering nurse. “Go get him some water.”

“Wait!” Lee yelps, as the nurse is turning to hurry out the door. “I’m not thirsty. I was just wondering when I can leave?” 

“Oh!” The nurse perks up, glancing down at his chart. The paper shuffling isn’t quite loud enough to cover up the rustle of sand from Gaara’s gourd. “It looks like the plan was to discharge you once you’d woken up. Your bones and muscles are all healed, we were really just waiting on your body to recover from the chakra depletion enough to regain consciousness. I’m sure the doctor will just want to make sure there’s no unexpected damage now that you’re awake, and that you’re tolerating the taper of your medications well.” 

Gaara crosses his arms. Lee can see the white bandages of his hand again, now, stark against the red of his jacket. His heart quails.

The nurse is looking at Gaara’s face again, wide-eyed, as if trying to discern his desires from his expression alone. Lee wishes he could help her, but Gaara’s back is to him. 

“I’ll just … go get the doctor now, so we can start Lee-san’s discharge paperwork?”

Gaara just barely inclines his head. 

The nurse shuffles from the room in a flurry of white fabric and fluttering paper. 

“That wasn’t necessary,” Lee says, when the door is closed behind her. 

Gaara comes to sit beside his bed again. He takes Lee’s undeserving hand in his as if it’s nothing. His thumb strokes along the back of Lee’s knuckles, skating around the place where a needle descends into his skin under wrinkled tape. 

“It’s necessary,” Gaara says shortly. When Lee opens his mouth to object, he continues, “I’m seeing to it that you get the attention you need for an optimal recovery.” 

Lee looks down at his body. He really is in very little pain at all. Perhaps the least pain he’s ever experienced after opening the gates. He curls and uncurls his toes, flexes his ankles and finds them tender but unbandaged. He glances at his free hand, expecting to see a line of stitches along his knuckles from the assailant’s bone fragments, but there’s nothing but pink, freshly grown skin. The healers really did a very thorough job. He feels as if he could resume his training tomorrow without even needing to adjust his reps.

“You did not need to intimidate the nurse in order to do that! I feel fine.” 

Gaara looks like he’s about to make a smart retort when someone raps on the door. It swings open without waiting for a response.

The doctor wears the same prim, unemotive expression as her charge, though her face is substantially more deeply wrinkled. Her hair is wrapped in a headscarf that covers her ears and neck and disappears beneath the collar of her uniform, her hitai-ate tying it firmly in place. 

“Lee-san,” she says, nodding. “Welcome back. Kazekage-sama, I hear you’ve been terrorizing my staff again.”

“Lee wants to know when he can come home,” Gaara says, thoroughly ignoring her chastisement. 

It’s an odd way of phrasing it. Lee doesn’t have a proper home in Suna—he’s been staying at the jounin barracks since he’s been stationed here. It’s part of an exchange of specialists between the nations. Just as he’s been training Suna’s genin on taijutsu techniques, Temari has been back in Konoha training the Leaf’s students on wind style. That is, unless Lee’s injuries mean he’s been terminated from the program … His heart sinks with dread. He has no idea how long he’s been unconscious. Suppose a replacement has already been sent up to the Academy in his stead? Perhaps his dismissal papers are waiting for him back at the barracks, his bags packed for him. 

The doctor seems not the least bit intimidated by Gaara as she crosses the room to study the monitors, then turns to Lee for a perfunctory examination that leaves him feeling more like a specimen than a patient. She lifts an eyelid and shines a light into it, listens to his chest with her icy stethoscope, bends his elbows and knees, disconnects his IV and has him stand up to walk a lap around the room. 

At the end of the proceedings she dusts her hands together brusquely. “Everything seems to be in order.” Lee’s sitting on the edge of the bed now, feeling quite exposed in his hospital gown and nothing else, and she looks him up and down with her piercing brown eyes. “Where will you be completing your recovery?” 

“Ah, the barrac—” Lee starts to say. 

“My home,” Gaara interrupts him, hand on Lee’s bare knee. 

Lee shoots him a sharp, bewildered look. When did they decide on that?

“Kazekage-sama—” The doctor’s brow furrows. “I’m certain that we can make other arrangements. We wouldn’t want to interfere with your work further, after how much time you’ve already spent here. We could have a nurse sent, or—”

Gaara’s hand finds Lee’s in the blankets, the one that’s still tacky from the IV tape, and squeezes it. 

“I’ll take care of him.” There’s a note of finality to his voice. An implication of _I dare you to defy me_. An echo of a promise sworn in the desert. 

The knock that stirs the silence next seems to ruffle even the doctor’s nerves. She narrows her eyes.

“I’m in with the patient,” she raises her voice to call. 

The door opens anyway, Kankuro standing in the aperture. 

“Whoa, hey!” He raises a hand in a casual salute. “Good to see ya among the living, beansprout!” 

“Good morning, Kankuro,” Lee says. He’s not actually sure if it’s morning. The pattern of daylight in Suna is not quite the same as that of Konoha, free of misty dawns and long sunrises. The sun comes up fast, and it stays bright all day.

Kankuro nods his acknowledgement before turning to his brother.

“Got a report for ya,” he announces. 

Gaara glances at Lee and then back at his brother, sharpish. “Can it wait?”

“It really can’t.”

Gaara huffs. He drops Lee’s hand to cross his arms. “Then you can give it in here.” 

“Listen, man—” Kankuro grimaces. “I didn’t mind giving briefings while the guy was passed out, but this is confidential!” He shoots a desperate glance to the doctor, who dutifully turns her head. His hand flicks up and forms two quick signs. _Intel. Assassin._

Gaara exhales sharply through his nose. 

“Fine.”

The door shutters behind them, but Gaara’s chakra lingers in the room like a third presence. 

The doctor turns her attention back to Lee. He realizes he never thought to ask her name, but he has no time to remember his manners because she’s already grabbing his wrist in a firm grip.

“Let me take your pulse once more.” She stills for a moment with two fingers on the meat of his wrist, dark eyes on the face of her watch. 

Lee feels the scrape of lingering sand winding around one of his ankles like a small, abrasive serpent, its presence strangely comforting. He doesn’t say a word about it. In fact, he tries very hard not to do anything at all that will make her decide he has to stay in the hospital for another night. 

“Good.” She drops his wrist, and his shoulder twinges only slightly as his hand falls back to the mattress. “I wasn’t going to mention it, but your heart rate was elevated while he was in the room.” 

She looks him square in the eye. It feels very much like being under interrogation. “You _are_ comfortable with your discharge plan, aren’t you?”

Lee swallows. “Ah, yes! That is—Gaara is a very kind and generous friend to offer me his home. I would also be fine to recuperate at the barracks, honestly. I don’t need any special attention.”

She snorts and shakes her head with a rueful grin. It’s the first sign of emotion other than steely irritation Lee has seen on her. It softens her. 

“Try telling the Kazekage that.” She grabs a lever underneath the mattress and raises the head of the bed to a low angle. “Lie back. You should still be getting as much rest as you can.” With a few beeps, she shuts down the remaining monitors. 

There’s a moment of silence where Lee thinks she’s planning to leave, but then she looks at him again with that penetrating gaze. 

“Between that Sand Armor of his and the Kazekage himself, Dr. Kusuri had quite the battle on her hands. You’re a much more agreeable patient.” 

Lee pictures Sakura-san’s face at hearing those words and stifles a laugh. Gaara must be a terror indeed if Lee is considered agreeable by comparison. 

“Um, thank you.” He ducks his head and notes how oddly painless the gesture is. It’s easily the best condition he’s ever been in after opening the gates. He wonders if the medicine in Suna is different, or if Sakura has just been leaving him in discomfort as her way of scolding him for overdoing it. “The care here has been excellent!” 

“Yes, well.” She gives him a look he can’t quite read. “Only the best for the Kazekage’s … close friend.” 

Lee beams and shoots her a thumbs-up. Her expression changes not one iota. 

She claps her hands once more. “I’ll go write up your prescriptions. A nurse will be in to tell you when you’re free to go.” 

The nurse returns before Gaara does. 

“Discharge papers for you to sign.” She holds the forms and a pen out under his nose. “Keep the last page. That’s your prescription if you need a refill.” 

She sets something paper-wrapped down on the bedside table with a thunk. The medicine, he assumes. A second parcel she sets at the end of the bed, stinking like an extinguished fire. 

“Your clothes,” she says. “Or, what’s left of them.” 

There’s a sense of familiarity about her that tickles the back of Lee’s brain. He has the vaguest notion that he knows her name, but only in the distant sense of an oft-forgotten acquaintance. Perhaps she’s the parent of one of the Academy students? 

“He’s very particular, isn’t he?” she interrupts his musing. 

“Who?”

She has her hitai-ate tying her hair into a high bun, so tightly that it makes her expression quite severe and judgmental-looking. “The Kazekage. You know he wouldn’t let the doctor attend to his own wounds until you were stabilized? He wouldn’t even walk down to the nurse’s station so we could wash the grit out of his burns.”

Lee’s mouth drops into a frown. Gaara shouldn’t be neglecting himself on Lee’s behalf.

“He told Dr. Kusuri that if she wouldn’t heal him at your bedside, she could just leave the bandages here and he’d do it himself,” the nurse continues. “The healing palm has a very short window of effect for skin damage. He’s going to have bad scarring.” 

Lee’s heart falters in his chest, thinking of the thick bandages swaddling Gaara’s hand. How severe is the damage beneath? 

The nurse sighs, fiddling with the tie of her smock. 

“I know that a lot of my colleagues have a thing for him, but I can’t say I understand it.” She takes the discharge papers back from Lee’s numb, unresisting fingers. “He’s a little scary when he gets like that. Intense. Though, I guess if you’re into that sort of thing …” 

She casts her eyes at the door with a vaguely wistful expression. 

“Well, just know that you’re very lucky.” 

“I’m thankful to be alive!” Lee agrees. 

She hums. “Yes, for that, too.” She doesn’t quite meet his eye as she makes for the room’s door. “Hit the call bell when he gets back, and we’ll have someone come up to see you out. Don’t try to leave on your own. Protocol, you understand.”

Then without a glance at Lee’s frantically bobbing head, she leaves. 

Lee is familiar with the sense of being left out, with the feeling that conversations are happening behind his back that he’s not privy to, that there’s some crucial undercurrent he’s missing. He has, after all, lived his whole life among geniuses, with only his fists to compensate. There’s something like that here, in the hustle and bustle of bodies coming and going, in the words said and unsaid. Something slippery, like the scales of a fish beneath the river’s surface. Something that keeps slipping just between his fingers. 

Gaara returns before Lee can quite grasp it, unaccompanied. 

“Is everything all right?” Lee asks him immediately, not bothering to pretend he didn’t see the message of Kankuro’s fingers. “It sounded very serious.” 

Gaara resumes his sentinel position in the bedside chair. “It was nothing you hadn’t already told me,” he says quietly. He curls his feet around the chair’s cross-bar, resting his elbows on his lifted knees. He looks very small like this. “The Akatsuki-that-wasn’t … It took our research division two days to confirm something you figured out in thirty seconds. Now they’ll track down the merchant and see if they can’t keep tracing the source of that costume.”

“Are you sure you should be telling me this?” Lee recalls Kankuro’s hesitance at sharing this information in front of him. “What if I run back and tell the Hokage?” 

Gaara’s eyes flick over him, impassive. He’s snapped his armor back on at some point since he’s been gone, so that those dark insomniac circles of his are rendered vaguely shimmery. Still, he looks suddenly very weary. 

“Konoha is our ally. This is information I would share with them anyway, an Akatsuki lookalike taking potshots at a Kage. Besides—” He straightens subtly. “—if I asked you to keep a secret for me, wouldn’t you?” 

Lee tenses despite his aching muscles. What Gaara’s asking of him … it would be the equivalent of agreeing to treason.

“You know I can’t do that.” 

“Good.” Gaara sits back in his chair with the hint of a smirk on his pink, scarred lips. He crosses an ankle over his knee, his arms over his chest. Almost cocky. “That’s what I thought you’d say. You’re loyal. Noble. Incorruptible. Kankuro was wrong about you as usual.” 

_What?_ That feeling of foundering returns at once, the water of sense draining from Lee’s cupped palms. 

Gaara hits the call bell.

They wait there in silence for the nurse, just the two of them and the weight of Gaara’s eyes on Lee.

* * *


	3. Chapter 3

* * *

“I had all your bags sent over from the barracks,” Gaara announces, toeing his shoes off in the entryway of his home. The hall is high-ceilinged, the roof arched so the heat rises. His voice is absorbed by the porous sandstone of the walls. “They should be in my bedroom now.” 

“All of them?” 

Lee has at least a month’s worth of jumpsuits and supplies in his various packs. The anticipated duration of his post at the Academy was meant to be at least a semester, so he packed heavily. But there should be no need for quite so much baggage for a short stint at Gaara’s home. The doctor said he could be back to teaching in a week, a timeframe which Lee has already committed to reducing to no more than three days. Why, even now, he feels nearly back to his full strength! 

Perhaps Gaara just didn’t know which of his things he’d need. 

“Wait, _your_ bedroom? Why?”

Gaara gives him a look. It’s the _why-aren’t-you-reading-my-mind_ look that normally precedes one of their discussions on the importance of verbal communication, coupled with a hint of the _you’re-being-stubborn_ look that typically accompanies Gaara dragging Lee off the training field with his sand. 

“You’ll be living here with me, obviously, until your mission ends two months from now.” He turns on a heel and begins walking up the hall. “Though I anticipate your return to Konoha will be brief. It shouldn’t take long for me to arrange a permanent transfer position for you.”

Lee scrambles after him so quickly his fingers nearly graze the floor. 

“A permanent … what?” 

Gaara has never been inclined to repeat himself, and he does not stray from this pattern as Lee babbles after him. Everything is happening with a terrible swiftness. 

Gaara is leading him down a hall he’s never seen before. Lee has been in Gaara’s home many times, but his visits have really only ever taken place in the main sitting room or Gaara’s home office. He’s seen the private greenhouse Gaara has out back maybe twice, and has glimpsed the kitchen on only a single occasion when he happened to arrive as Gaara was cooking. 

The floor of the hallway curves and slopes down, the air cooling as they walk. The high, round windows that Sunan buildings use to let the light in grow smaller and smaller until they’re gone entirely, replaced by strung bulbs lit from within by dim, golden light. Lee realizes they’re descending into the lower floors of the house, the sprawling underground structures that make up the private spaces of Sunan architecture. 

Lee catches up enough to clap a hand on Gaara’s shoulder. Gaara stills, casting a glance behind him at Lee’s panicked face. The sand in the gourd at his waist does not so much as stir. Gaara has been getting more comfortable with Lee’s propensity for physical contact in the months he’s been in Suna, but the absence of any reaction from the sand _at all_ is … noteworthy. 

“You want me to live with you?” Lee squeaks. “Permanently?”

Gaara gives him a flat, distant look. “It seemed the natural conclusion.”

Lee sputters. Natural to _whom_ , exactly? 

It’s not as though he’s never imagined himself living with Gaara—in his dream of some far-flung future where he’s swallowed his anxieties and where practical considerations are no matter—but there’s a certain order to things. An order that doesn’t start with a dying kiss in the desert and fast-forward to _cohabitating_. Lee hasn’t had a chance to declare his intentions, or to woo Gaara with flowers and sweets and poetry—or, well, this is the desert, so it may have to be cacti instead of flowers, and Gaara doesn’t really like sugary food, but poetry is definitely still an essential component. They haven’t even gone on a proper date yet. All manner of bold declarations are being made here!

“People … normally talk about this sort of thing first,” Lee says weakly. 

Gaara looks him up and down, studying Lee like he might a particularly stubborn pest on his aloe vera plants. 

“Will you move in with me?” His tone is that of someone inquiring if there’s enough rice in the cupboard before the week’s grocery shopping, not that of a man asking for a lifetime commitment. 

Lee’s throat works. The object lodged in it is less a lump and more a boulder of sandstone. 

“Can—um. Can I think about it for a bit first?” he hedges, despite the little voice in the back of his head that’s jumping for joy and punching the air, screaming, _Yes! Of course yes!_

Gaara’s nostrils flare just the minutest amount. 

“Fine,” he says. “How long do you anticipate you’ll need to come to a decision?” 

“It’s not …” Lee twists his toe against the sandstone floor. “... really the sort of thing that can be predicted.” 

Gaara raises his hands as if to brush them together to dismiss the conversation, but he freezes at the last moment.

They both stare at the bandage on his left hand, the jarring white of it in the underground shadows. 

Lee’s heart stutters to a stop. 

Gaara’s mouth is drawn down small and tight. Not quite a frown, but close to it. His lips are still that cracking, shiny pink. 

Everyone must have known, Lee thinks, what it was that Gaara did. When Lee was rushed through the doors of the hospital with his jumpsuit singed through and his skin boiling red, and Gaara with just glass shards in the place of his normally impenetrable armor. When Gaara refused to have his own wounds tended to until he was sure Lee was taken care of. Even with the armor back on him now, it masks nothing, reflecting the shapes and colors of his skin in broad strokes, the telltale burns of his lips and the bandages of his hand. 

In shinobi society, gossip and scandal are a currency more valuable than gold. How the rumors must have flown as Gaara kept vigil at Lee’s bedside for however many days, taking all his briefings in the hospital room, chastising the nurses at the slightest hint of substandard care. 

“I’ll show you to my room,” Gaara says, turning once more to stride away.

Lee hurries after him only to catch a whiff of himself. He reeks of sweat and hospital tape. The underarms of his hospital gown—the only thing he had to wear with his suit burnt to near unrecognizability—are pitted dark and salt-ringed. 

“Actually,” he calls, “could you show me to the bathroom? I’m in desperate need of a shower.” 

Gaara inclines his head soundlessly and leads him down a side hallway. 

They stop outside a nondescript door, marked only by a small hook on the wall beside it. Gaara unharnesses his gourd and hangs it there, then opens the door to usher Lee inside. Lee hears the crackle of the sand armor rustling off and slipping into the gourd behind him. 

Bathrooms in Suna are quite different from the ones in Konoha, with a dedicated focus on maximum conservation of water. The showerhead is at the top of the room, and rinse water sloughs down the steep floor into a trough where it’s stored as greywater for plants, or for purification and household reuse. 

Gaara closes the door behind them as Lee gets his bearings. 

Then he just stands there, arms crossed. 

“Well?”

“I … it’s very nice! It’s not so dissimilar to the one in the jounin barracks!” 

Though of course the accommodations in the Kazekage’s home are crafted from much finer material, all smooth cream tile and clean, white grout. The shower is clearly designed to be used by just one person at a time. It’s an unprecedented luxury for Lee, who has been accustomed to showering with the sweaty masses of the jounin corps. Not that there’s anything wrong with his typical bathing arrangements! There’s nothing for camaraderie quite like a shared bath! Though most of Suna’s jounin don’t seem to agree, and mostly ignore Lee when he tries to engage them in conversation during their ablutions. 

Gaara nods once, then his good hand goes to the high collar of his coat and begins to unbutton it.

“What are you doing?” Lee yelps. 

“I’m going to help you bathe,” Gaara says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. His coat is already halfway unbuttoned, and beneath he’s wearing nothing but a thin tunic over a mesh armor shirt. 

“I’m certain I can handle—” 

Gaara drops his coat by the door and pulls his shirts up over his head in a single motion. Lee’s throat dries up instantly. Gaara’s chest and stomach are ropily muscled, all his power contained lean and compact. His skin is sunlessly pale, his nipples very small and very pink. There’s the slightest hint of shadow between his ribs, as though he’s skipped a few too many meals. 

“The doctor’s orders were to take it easy. No strenuous exertion.” 

He reaches for the ties on Lee’s hospital gown next, and Lee practically leaps backward to evade him. 

“A shower is hardly _strenuous_!” 

“I’d rather not bring the sand in to hold you still. The moisture in the shower makes it sluggish.” Gaara’s eyes narrow. “But I will if I have to.” 

Lee thinks of the last time Gaara’s sand was made slow by water with a pang of guilt. 

He relents, shedding his hospital gown with a flush of embarrassment. He cups his hands over himself in some fruitless attempt to preserve his modesty, but Gaara isn’t even looking at him, instead bent over to roll his trousers at the ankles. 

“Sit.” Gaara gestures firmly to the bath stool, not quite upright yet. 

The little wooden stool at the head of the room has uneven legs to match the slope of the floor. Lee sits on it warily, and the seat rocks and wobbles slightly with a clatter on the tile. 

Gaara looks up sharply. His eyes linger for long enough that Lee starts to feel the heat creeping down his face to stain his chest. He’s out of hands to cover himself further, so he’s resigned to subjecting himself to Gaara’s scrutiny. 

Then Gaara makes a little flicking gesture with his hand. Moments later, a tiny amount of sand creeps under the door frame and slithers up the tile. Lee braces himself, expecting to be borne down, but the sand situates itself beneath the uneven leg of the stool.

Lee shifts his weight and finds the seat stabilized.

“Thank you!” 

Gaara doesn’t respond. He seems to have regained his focus, and he’s close once more, turning on the water and searching through a little caddy for a bottle of something he uncaps with his teeth. 

The scent of Gaara’s shampoo saturates the room as it slowly fills with steam. Lee has only gotten close enough to smell it a few times—during less than a handful of sparring sessions and a single, hurried goodbye hug—but he would recognize the spice of it anywhere. 

Gaara holds his good hand up to the showerhead to test the water temperature, then repositions the device and circles around behind so Lee can rinse off. 

The water pressure is sublime. Lee turns his head this way and that to get the perfect angle of it on his face. His eyes fall closed with delight. Oh, yes this is just what he needed. It’s so much better than the weak trickle of water that comes out of the faucets in the barracks. 

He’s so absorbed in the pleasure of the sweat and grit rinsing off his skin that he doesn’t notice Gaara moving until a hand cups the back of his head. Lee stills. Gaara’s small, strong fingers card his hair back from his forehead. Gentle pressure strokes along his scalp and works free the hospital bed tangles. The touch is so achingly careful it almost hurts. 

Gaara pours a small amount of shampoo directly onto Lee’s hair, and the smell of him gets all the stronger. He rubs small, precise circles at the roots of Lee’s hair, the crown of his head, his temples. Surrounded by warmth and scent and touch, it’s impossible not to think about Gaara doing this to himself, his pale body swathed in steam and dripping rivulets of water. Lee imagines Gaara touching his own body with this gentleness, those small fingers rubbing over tight, pink nipples and further down, to—

He wrenches his eyes open to distract from the fantasy. He can feel himself stirring beneath his hands. Times like these, he wishes he had the chakra control for the exercises they teach young shinobi at the Academy, the ones to regulate expressions of carnal interest that might distract one from a mission. 

His reprieve is brief as Gaara moves in front of him to detach the showerhead and rinse the suds from his hair. Lee looks down and away from the intensity of Gaara’s eyes and the temptation of his bare chest and stomach. Gaara’s slender calves and bony ankles protrude from the rolled hems of his thin linen trousers. His bare toes curl like little pink shrimp on the tile. Every inch of him is perfect.

Lee should close his eyes again. He should look away and try to control himself. But, unlike present company, Lee is far from perfect. He can’t quite muster the willpower to do the needful. 

Gaara reaches past him to grab a washcloth, and his thin chest brushes past Lee’s shoulder. The slickness of his warm skin brings to mind an altogether more prurient sort of dampness, the sweat wrought from youthful exertion in battle or … something much more intimate. 

Gaara wrings the washcloth between his fingers, then drapes the fabric over the wrist of his burnt hand while he retrieves the soap. Trying to create suds on the washcloth one-handed soon proves to be a challenging proposition. 

“I can do that,” Lee offers, watching Gaara struggle as the washcloth evades his grasp, splatting to the tile for the second time in as many minutes. 

“No,” Gaara snaps. “I said I’d take care of you, and I will.”

The gauze wrapping Gaara’s hand is turning transparent with moisture, little sticky ends coming unbound. 

“I don’t think you’re supposed to get those bandages wet—”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine! You don’t even have two working hands, and I am perfectly capable of washing my—!”

Gaara makes a frustrated noise, halfway to a growl. He puts his hand to his mouth and rips right through the bandages with his teeth. 

Saturated gauze and tape hit the tile with a slap. 

Lee stares. 

He’s no stranger to burns, but these are as bad as any he’s ever seen. 

Gaara wasn’t lying about the blistering. His palm is bubbled with massive, pus-filled welts, the skin thin and shiny. His fingers look stiff, bright pink and so tight with scar tissue that even the wrinkles at his joints have been erased. His ring and pinky finger move as a single unit, the skin between them fused into webbing. 

The nurse said Gaara’s burns were severe, but Lee never expected anything like this. It will be a miracle if he heals enough to form proper hand signs after this. 

Lee’s heart plunges to the bottom of his chest.

“You must be in so much _pain_ ,” he breathes, reaching for Gaara’s wrist.

Gaara jerks his hand back.

“I’m always in pain. I lived with a malformed curse seal on my heart for half my life.” 

And this close, Lee can see that, too. On the pale skin of Gaara’s chest, right over his heart, is a glossy white mark in the pattern of a jinchuuriki seal. The skin around it is warped with silvery stretch marks, like the seal tugged at his skin every day for years. It’s as if the demon twisted Gaara’s very body as it rattled the bars of its cage and sought escape.

It’s the only other defect on the whole expanse of his bare skin, Lee realizes dimly, though looking at the scarring on Gaara’s hand and mouth, shouldn’t there be …?

“What?” Gaara asks, noticing Lee’s curious stare.

“Nothing,” Lee says quickly. “I just thought …” 

“Thought?” 

The washcloth lies crumpled on the tile between them as the shower cuts off. It must be on some sort of timer. The room is suddenly deadly quiet. 

“Do you remember the first time we fought?” Lee asks softly. “I kicked you pretty badly, even though the armor. And then later on, Sasuke-kun …” 

A faint line forms between Gaara’s brows, his expression searching.

Lee blanches, but he pushes on. 

“... The whole arena heard you yelling about your blood, I think.”

“Ah.” Gaara inhales thinly. “I had the jinchuuriki healing factor back then. I was wounded in both fights, and later by Naruto as well, but the bijuu don’t let their hosts stay injured for long. Not when it would create an undesirable vessel.”

Lee has never heard Gaara speak so frankly about the tailed beast before. References to the Kazekage’s checkered past are only spoken of in Suna as whispered myths. It’s a tradition even Gaara—who normally eschews conventions—adheres to. He only ever alludes to his past in vague referent, or in the context of his own personal emotional failings, in order to pass along a lesson about trust or friendship. 

At least, that’s how he behaves when under observation. He and Lee rarely spend much time together in private. There’s almost always someone else present when they’re together, whether that be Lee’s students or Gaara’s brother or even just the proprietor of whatever restaurant they’ve chosen to dine at. And of course, Gaara’s ANBU are a near-ubiquitous presence.

But even the ANBU aren’t here now. 

“Since Shukaku was removed,” Gaara continues, gaze fixed on some distant point above Lee’s head, “well, it hasn’t been a problem. Aside from the three of you, no one else has ever been able to penetrate the ultimate defense.” 

Gaara’s still holding his hand well out of Lee’s reach, palm facing away so Lee can’t get a good look at his blisters. He should really put those bandages back on immediately; the rest of Lee’s shower can wait. He’s already mostly clean from the shampoo rinsing down on him, and if those blisters pop while Gaara doesn’t have bandages on, they could get infected.

“Can I see your hand, please?” Lee asks, reaching.

“No.” Gaara takes a half-step back.

“Don’t be stubborn.” Lee frowns. “I’m no healer, but I get injured quite a bit, and—”

“I can see that.” Gaara’s gaze drags along Lee’s scarred hands and arms, the sword slashes and kunai notches along his forearms and biceps. “You’re fast enough to evade most common attacks. Why don’t you defend yourself better?” 

Lee will not let himself be deterred by a conversation about battle strategy.

“We’re not talking about me right now.” He lunges forward in his seat. 

Gaara sidesteps him, and his heel plants right on the slippery washcloth. 

Gaara’s leg goes out from under him. He stumbles, throwing his injured hand into the air to protect it. The little pillow of sand that was holding the chair steady rushes to catch him, and in so doing sends the bath stool’s seat rocking. Lee’s in such a precarious position already that he overbalances. 

The stool skids across the floor, colliding with the far wall with a clatter. They go sprawling into one another, tumbling and sliding down the steep angle of the shower floor.

They end up splayed atop each other along the drain at the base of the room. 

Their faces are but a hair’s breadth apart, their knees tangled together. Gaara’s massive chakra lashes against them like waves colliding with a distant shore. 

Lee scrambles to get up, to check that Gaara hasn’t further injured himself, but he only makes it onto his knees. His thigh bumps against something that makes Gaara grunt. 

He looks down. Gaara’s thin linen trousers are saturated with runoff water, his bare skin visible beneath the now-sheer fabric. Lee’s eyes land on the location of his thigh between Gaara’s spread legs, and … _oh_. 

Gaara’s scarred lips and his nipples aren’t the only things that are pink.

Lee shifts once more. Gaara bites down on a throaty noise. His eyelashes flutter before his gaze refocuses on Lee’s face, expression intent. 

Lee tries to tamp down on the tension between what his ideals tell him he’s supposed to want and what his heart and body long for. There are certain things that his nindo has taught him are the greatest aspirations of a man’s life. Things like honor. Things like love. 

Lee is _supposed_ to want soft, tender hands that might one day consent to be held by his own rough and bandaged ones. He’s supposed to want romantic declarations and pledges of eternal love before there’s even the consideration of touching. He’s supposed to want gentle, passionate first kisses that don’t burn, that don’t wound. These are the goals of a splending ninja, one who eschews the dark desires and pleasures of the body in favor of honing a more perfect weapon. 

Lee’s not supposed to want a small hand with bitten nails scrabbling through the hair on his lower belly. He’s not supposed to want hot hardness pressed up against his thigh, rubbing with the subtlest of pressures in time with the rising and falling of a pale chest. He’s not supposed to want Luna moth green eyes with their shining, animal pupils blown wide with lust, or damp breaths panting across his too-close, gaping mouth. 

Lee has always denied his body what it wants, whether that be sleep or respite or … Well. His body wants plenty, just now. 

They stare at each other for a moment, hanging on the precipice of … something. 

Gaara turns his head and takes a thin breath. His limbs relax; his hand drops to the tile. 

“You’re supposed to be taking it easy,” he mutters wryly. 

Lee exhales a long, shaky sigh. 

“Right.” He sits upright, putting some distance between himself and the hot crook of Gaara’s thighs, and looks around the bathroom. He very studiously ignores how his erection bobs in the damp and cooling air. “Um. Where are your towels?” 

Gaara props up on his elbows, looking not the least bit embarrassed by his own predicament. 

“The sand normally dries me adequately. But I have some towels in the linen closet.” He maneuvers himself awkwardly upright, putting all his weight on his good hand. “Just a moment …”

“If you tell me where they are, I can get them myself!” Lee clambers to his feet. 

Gaara looks at him for a long beat. “No,” he says. “You can’t.”

“You don’t need to be so delicate with me,” Lee says hotly. 

Gaara’s eyes drag down Lee’s face and chest, stopping pointedly at the apex of Lee’s thighs. “I wasn’t concerned about your … delicacy.”

Lee’s hands snap to cover his crotch again. _Oh._ It would be terribly inappropriate to go barreling down Gaara’s hallway in such a state. Although Gaara himself is really in no less compromising a position!

But Gaara is already walking away. He cracks the bathroom door enough that a rush of cool air sucks half the steam from the room and sticks just his bare arm into the hallway. Lee hears the sand rushing down the corridor outside. 

The object he hands Lee moments later is so thin and scratchy it can hardly be called a towel.

“Thank you,” Lee says meekly, wrapping it around his waist tightly enough that his flagging erection is hopefully not too obvious. 

Gaara stares for so long that Lee’s body can’t decide whether to send his flush rushing up to his face or further south. 

“I’ll show you to my room so you can dress.” Gaara gathers up his and Lee’s shed clothes and slings his jacket around his shoulders. The sand rushes up to meet him as he leaves the bathroom, like a pet that’s been locked outside for bad behavior. 

Lee follows him down another unmarked hall, the towel’s coarse fibers chafing him all the way. 

They’re going to need to talk linens if Lee is going to be staying here for any length of time.

* * *


	4. Chapter 4

“Sit there,” Gaara directs Lee once they’re in his bedroom, pointing to the edge of his mattress. 

His small room is utilitarian and undecorated, as if he spends very little time in here at all. It looks more like an efficiency apartment at the barracks than the bedroom of a Kage. Unlike the lush greenery that bedecks Gaara’s office, his kitchen, and his common room, in his bedroom there is not so much as a single succulent or cactus in the windowsill. The room contains little more than a tan-blanketed bed, a washbasin with a tin mirror, and a small wardrobe with Lee’s many disorderly packs heaped beside it. Gaara approaches the last of these presently. 

“I’ll get your things.”

Lee defiantly remains standing. “It will be faster if I get them myself.”

Gaara’s lips thin. He is, just as he claimed, already completely dry despite not toweling off. His hair frizzes around his face, staticky and uncombed. He has left the Sand Armor off and in his gourd, which he’s hung on a hook beside the door next to his Kage robes and hat. 

“I don’t care which is faster,” he says sharply. “I care about you not overexerting yourself.”

Lee crosses his arms over his chest. He can be just as mulish as Gaara when he sets his mind to it.

“I’ll let you get my clothes if you let me bandage your hand up after.”

Gaara narrows his eyes and goes to cross his arms right back. 

At the last moment, he freezes, glancing down at his swollen, blistered hand. He must have just realized that tucking it in his armpit will put the fragile skin in contact with the rough fabric of his coat. 

“Fine,” he says, voice tight. 

He stalks over to Lee’s bags and rifles through them. He practically hurls Lee’s pajamas at him, followed by a roll of bandages and a jar of ointment retrieved from his bedside table. 

Gaara begins to strip out of his wet pants, and Lee turns his head away so quickly he almost gets whiplash. Fighting the urge to peek, Lee hurries into his pajamas, which aren’t even proper pajamas at all, but just a thin t-shirt and sweatpants. 

Gaara leaves his own clothes in a heap on the floor, ignoring the laundry hamper placed against the wall. He tugs a pair of shorts on one-handed and sits beside Lee on the bedspread. The shorts are made of a soft, heather grey fabric. Their hems end well above his bony knees. 

“Here.” He holds his hand out, palm up, expression puckish. 

Lee cradles Gaara’s hand gently in his own. 

It looks worse up close. 

It’s not just the ring finger and pinky that are fused with taut scar tissue; the first joint of nearly every finger is at least partly connected with thick, blistered skin. The skin is hot to the touch from the inflammation, even on the less-damaged back of his hand. There’s a ropy mass of tissue down the side of his thumb that looks like the space where a ligament used to be. 

One of the blisters on the heel of his palm has burst, and Lee cleans it ever-so-gently with gauze pads and sterilizing solution, his eyes flicking from his work up to Gaara’s face and back again, checking for any sign of discomfort. Then he rubs thick ointment into every scarred joint with careful precision, the medicinal smell stinging his nose. 

Gaara’s face is impassive with irritation throughout, his gaze fixed on the wall over Lee’s shoulder. He doesn’t move. He hardly even seems to breathe.

When the open wounds are cleaned, Lee supports Gaara’s hand by the wrist and tenderly loops white fabric around the whole mass of absorbent gauze. He winds the bandages in between Gaara’s stiff, ointment-soaked fingers as best he can, as if the slight separation will encourage them to heal on their own. 

He’ll probably need surgery, Lee thinks, if he ever wants to move those fingers independently again. 

“I’m supposed to be the one helping you,” Gaara says roughly, as Lee neatly ties off the bandages at the back of his wrist. His hand now looks like a bulkier version of Lee’s own training wraps. 

“I’m really fine.” Lee strokes a finger under the edge of the wrappings, ostensibly checking that they’re not too tight, but really just because he wants to keep touching Gaara with that same apologetic tenderness. “It was only the seventh gate.” 

Gaara shakes his head, muttering sarcastically under his breath, “Only the seventh gate …” 

“You came out of it much worse than me.” Lee can feel his emotions starting to choke him now, up the back of his throat and welling in his eyes. “You shouldn’t have even been injured at all, but now you can’t even do hand signs, and it’s all my fault—”

“It’s no big loss.” Gaara’s good hand cups Lee’s cheek. “I haven’t used a hand sign in years. And if I get desperate, I can just make a partial sand clone and use its hand instead.” 

“But I was supposed to protect you, and instead I—” 

Gaara’s fingers slip down over Lee’s lips, pushing them against his teeth. 

“I don’t regret it.” The words slip between those cracked pink lips all in a rush. “I’d do it again a thousand times over. I just wish I hadn’t been too scared to act sooner.”

“You were scared?” Lee whispers against the pressure of Gaara’s fingers. It defies imagining, the idea of confident, self-assured Gaara being frightened of anything. “Of what?” 

“You nearly _died_ ,” Gaara breathes. His fingers are no longer pressing, but now just stroking along the curve of Lee’s lips, mapping their shape. “I told myself that if we survived, I wasn’t going to be scared anymore. I was going to have you the way I always wanted.” 

Lee freezes, held fast by the weight of Gaara’s eyes. The bruises around them are deeper than they were out in the desert. They’re hollower, more sleepless. 

Gaara has never given the slightest indication that he _wanted_ Lee in any way at all. He has been a wonderful friend, someone whose companionship Lee has valued through sparring sessions and shared meals and long walks together in the desert. But there has never been so much as a hint that Lee’s romantic inclinations were returned. There’s only been the slow opening of Gaara’s expressions, like flowers coming into bloom, and the gradual acceptance of hesitant touch: a hand upon a shoulder or stretched down to pull him off the ground. Nothing more than the natural expectations of a deepening friendship. And Lee has refused to project his own desperate feelings onto Gaara. 

The thought from the hospital room resurfaces like a bubble in molten glass. That Lee might still be out in the desert, caught in the throes of the Gate of Wonder. That he might still be dreaming. 

Gaara’s fingers have slipped past the corner of his mouth to stroke along his cheek, down the line of his jaw to trail his neck. The pads of his intact fingers are soft and uncalloused, his skin cool. 

He leans forward and presses a gentle kiss to the bow of Lee’s mouth. His fingers pet the column of Lee’s throat, his lips moving just barely. Rough, cracked skin catches Lee’s lower lip. 

Rough, cracked, _burned_ skin. 

Lee draws back. 

He can’t do this. He can’t take this from Gaara, even as his heart screams and batters itself against his ribs. He can’t allow himself to have this when all he’s done is act selfishly and get Gaara hurt. 

Gaara’s hand drops to the bedspread. 

“You don’t want this,” he says, very softly. His intense gaze falls from Lee’s face, and he seems to withdraw inside himself. “You asked me to kiss you when you thought you were dying, but you don’t want to stay here with me. You don’t want to kiss me … You don’t want _me_.”

But Lee _does_ want. His soul is straining at the bounds of his skin. He wants it—wants Gaara—more than anything. It’s just that he can’t allow himself to have it, because it would be wrong. Because he doesn’t deserve it. 

A curious look dawns slowly on Gaara’s face, like the sun creeping over the sand flats. 

“When I kissed you, were you imagining someone else?” 

“What?” It takes a moment for Lee’s brain to catch up to how badly Gaara has misunderstood. 

Gaara’s eyes search his, his mouth drawn down in contemplation. “Was it Haruno Sakura? You were very fond of her once. I remember when we were younger, you told her—”

“No!” Lee shouts, then drops his voice at the warning look on Gaara’s face. “It’s true I once held a deep affection for Sakura-san, but now we are merely close friends! I haven’t thought of her in that way in ages.” 

Gaara is still looking at him intently. The sun was still midday bright outside when they first entered the house, but the bedroom buried deep in the sand is dim and windowless. There’s only a single bare-bulbed battery lamp on the bedside table, long filamented and warmly flickering. It makes sparks across the patterns of Gaara’s Luna moth irises, leaves cooling embers in the pits of his wide, green pupils. 

“I was only thinking of you,” Lee whispers. “The only person I’ve thought about kissing in _years_ … is you.” 

“Then why?” Gaara hisses back. “What changed?” 

Lee swallows loudly, feeling out-of-depth and incendiary. The heat in Gaara’s eyes is matched by the warmth rising low in Lee’s belly. Gaara’s chakra, previously just simmering between them, crests to a boiling point. 

“I _hurt_ you.” 

“I hurt you once, and you forgave me.” Gaara nods at the sand scarring on Lee’s left arm, the long purple suture line and its surrounding staple marks. Gaara’s bandaged fist sits on the mattress between them like a body wrapped for burial. “Call it even.”

“That’s not the same!” Lee protests. “That was a battle between sworn enemies. This was—”

“I know it’s not the same,” Gaara cuts him off. “I don’t care. I’m not upset, so there’s no point being mad at yourself on my behalf.” 

Lee falters. Gaara’s good hand grabs Lee’s scarred one, runs a thumb over the freshly healed skin on the back of his knuckles. 

“You forgave me that quickly?” Lee asks. 

“There was nothing to forgive,” Gaara says, soft as thistle down. “I knew the effect the seventh gate has on body temperature. I chose to kiss you anyway.” 

He gathers up Lee’s hand to his mouth and presses a kiss to the thick, insensate tissue.

“Lee, I _wanted_ to.” He kisses the outline of the friction burns on Lee’s thumb, trails kisses up the scar-freckled, pockmarked skin of his wrist and down the long, long line where Tsunade’s scalpel sliced him open to retrieve the bone fragments that threatened his ligaments. He’s entirely in Lee’s space now, pressing an open-mouthed kiss to the thin skin inside his elbow with the hint of warm-wet tongue. 

Lee isn’t supposed to want this. He shouldn’t have asked for it before, and he shouldn’t be allowing it now. There has been no love confession, no commitment, no pledge of eternal devotion and no swearing to protect one another with their lives.

Though Lee opened seven of eight gates to protect Gaara. He begged a kiss as his dying wish. And Gaara asked Lee to live with him, permanently. He helped Lee bathe and he let Lee bandage his wounds. He said he _wanted_ Lee before and that he still wants him now.

Lee studies the ridged, blood-dark mark on Gaara’s forehead. _Love_. He’s never thought to ask where it came from. 

“But your _hand—_ ”

“I don’t want to talk about my hand anymore. I don’t want to think about it.” Gaara looks up, face right in Lee’s breathing room, and whispers, “All I want is to kiss you again, if you’ll let me.” 

His eyes are boring into Lee’s. 

Maybe it’s not the perfect words that are so important. 

Lee opens his heart and dares to _want_. 

His breath is all stuck in his throat when he murmurs back, “You can kiss me again.” 

Gaara pulls him in by the shoulder, and their mouths collide. 

He’s doing those hurried, awkward kisses again, those rough presses that are more sound than sensation. The cracked skin at the edges of his mouth brushing against Lee’s and the hard pressure of his teeth behind his lips are all that Lee can feel. Lee tries to soften his mouth, to tilt his head, but Gaara just keeps attacking the problem from the same angle with single-minded determination. 

After a moment, Gaara pulls back with a low noise of frustration. 

“It doesn’t feel as good as last time,” he mutters. 

Last time, Lee burnt part of Gaara’s body almost beyond recognition, so these kisses must feel miserable indeed. 

Gaara scrubs the back of his wrist against his mouth roughly. “The nerves …” 

_Oh._ Well, if there’s one thing Lee knows how to do, it’s how to find the sensation around scar tissue. 

“Here,” he says. He pulls Gaara in by the upper arms, until he’s practically in Lee’s lap. “Let me try.” 

He kisses Gaara gently. Just one long, slow press of lips shifting in subtle motions. He licks along the taut skin of Gaara’s lower lip, a hand slipping up to cup his face and ease his jaw open. 

He slips his tongue into the soft, wet insides of Gaara’s mouth. 

There’s a sigh, nearly lost between them. 

“That’s better.” And then Gaara’s mimicking the action, licking into Lee’s mouth and tracing the shapes of his teeth, his tongue. 

Gaara shifts as they kiss again and again, motions clumsy as he straddles Lee’s lap, holding himself steady with a death grip around Lee’s hip. Small hands slip up and under the hem of Lee’s shirt. Lee loses his breath to the contrasting textures of soft skin and rough bandages on either side of his ribs. 

Gaara’s tongue plunges into his mouth, insistent, searching. Its tip drags along the ridges on the roof of Lee’s mouth. The wet noises of their joined lips and Gaara’s shaky, ragged breathing fill Lee’s ears. Hips rock down against his hips, bony knees braced on the outside of his thighs. 

Gaara’s hard again. Lee’s in no better state. 

Gaara shoves Lee’s shirt up, fumbling and struggling at the shoulders as he tries to wrest the garment up and over Lee’s head one-handed. Lee pulls back long enough to help him dispatch it, and Gaara tumbles him backwards into the pillows. They’re thin, shapeless things, their cases as scratchy and ascetic as the towels. 

“I thought I was supposed to be taking it easy,” Lee mumbles, half-dazed with arousal.

Gaara’s rough nails scrape down Lee’s chest, through the hair that leads to the waistline of his pants. 

“For what I have planned, you won’t need to move at all,” he replies, voice low and raspy. “Just lie back and let me take care of you.” 

He bends to kiss Lee again, searing. That small, clever hand works loose the drawstring of Lee’s pants and pushes the waistband down past his hips. Lee helps him strip his pants the rest of the way, ignoring Gaara’s baleful look when he lifts his hips and wriggles to get the pants all the way down. Gaara and the doctor might have been onto something with the instructions to rest; just this small amount of writhing on the mattress and their little tussle in the bathroom has left Lee’s muscles aching. 

“Relax.” Gaara sits heavy on Lee’s thighs, as if Lee couldn’t throw him off with a single motion. He leans in close and whispers, “I said I’d take care of you. I promised.” 

Something about that sits wrong in Lee’s chest. The notion of oaths or obligations. _Call it even,_ Gaara said, but then he spoke like this. There’s an echo there of a promise that Lee only half-remembers. He grabs Gaara’s shoulders and holds him back. 

“Gaara-kun, do you feel …” Lee hesitates. “Are you doing this because you feel like you have to? You don’t owe me anything just because I didn’t die.” 

Gaara stills, looking at Lee for just a moment with a strange, curious expression on his face. Then he sits back and takes Lee’s left hand. He drags it slowly down his own chest, then rubs it across the thin fabric that covers his crotch. Lee can feel the heat of him even through his shorts, a slight dampness near the head already. He’s just as hard as he was back in the shower—harder, maybe, even—and though Lee can’t see the pink flush of his head through the grey cloth, he can picture it vividly. Lee’s fingers move to grip him, instinctive, before his brain even registers what he’s doing. 

Gaara shivers, but then he pulls Lee’s hand away and places it on the pillow beside his head with a firm press of his fingers. 

“I want to do this,” he says, sounding much less composed than moments before. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t want it. If I didn’t want you. Now … _relax_.”

He slips down Lee’s body with a long, wet kiss down his chest that seems to drag on indefinitely, all tongue and the slightest scrape of sharp teeth. He crawls between Lee’s legs, and Lee’s thighs splay wide, the motion automatic. 

Lee has no idea how he’s meant to relax with Gaara touching him like this, the smooth skin of his cheek nuzzling against Lee’s inner thighs and down into the junction of his leg and hip. Gaara’s just as unpracticed with this as he was with kissing, using his whole face as a guide for his wet, open mouth, leaving sloppy trails of spit that go cool in the room’s air. He rubs his nose and parted lips up and down Lee’s shaft, graceless and slow. 

Lee sucks in air. He isn’t sure when he stopped breathing. The room smells like ozone again, crackling with Gaara’s chakra. 

“I don’t really know what I’m doing,” Gaara mumbles to the junction of Lee’s thighs, words muffled by the close press of thin skin and coarse hair. 

Lee sits up immediately. “You don’t need to—” 

“Lay down.” Gaara’s uninjured hand smacks loud against Lee’s abdomen, pushes him back until he’s flat on the sheets again. “I’m just warning you.” 

His breath gusts wet-hot across Lee’s tender skin. 

“I admit I don’t really know what we’re doing either,” Lee tells the ceiling, as Gaara kisses the head of his dick like it’s another mouth, all probing tongue and spit-slickness along the slit. 

“Good.” Gaara’s mouth trails the swollen underside of his dick, tongue making shapes that could be meaningless or could be messages in a language Lee’s too lust-drunk to interpret. “Then you won’t be able to tell if it’s bad.”

“I’m certain nothing you could do to me would feel—”

Gaara licks up the seam of Lee’s balls, his tongue loose and wet. 

“—ba—hh _hhh oh god!_ ” Lee bows nearly in half, his body jackknifing until his chin almost touches his knees. 

Gaara’s fingers splay on his stomach and push him back once more. 

“Be _still._ ” 

Lee’s sore, knitted muscles untangle; he sags against the sheets. 

There’s a moment where Gaara’s mouth doesn’t touch him at all, just the five points of pressure from the soft pads of his fingers on Lee’s abdomen. 

“Was that bad?” Gaara murmurs. 

Lee can feel the tenor of his low voice all along his throbbing shaft. 

“No,” Lee says weakly. It’s a miracle he can form words at all. “It was—It was good. Very, very good.” 

Gaara hums, and the vibration of that nearly sends Lee folding back in half. He repeats the lick, longer and slower and somehow impossibly wetter as Lee trembles. He does it again and again and again, until Lee’s balls are drawn tight against his body, aching. 

Gaara’s mouth trails up. He circles the base of Lee’s shaft with a slick motion of his tongue, dragging his lips slow up to the head. Lee doesn’t expect Gaara to grab him firmly at the base, doesn’t expect the exquisite pressure of those thin fingers squeezing him with steady pressure. 

Gaara pauses for a moment, his loud breathing gone suddenly silent. Lee tries to sit up to get a better look at him, to check if he’s all right, only to be pushed back down at the same moment Gaara’s lips close around the head of his cock. 

The heat and wetness is so intense it beggars belief. Lee stares at the ceiling in a state of exquisite frustration, fully consumed by sound and sensation and robbed of his sight. He can only catch the slightest glimpses of that head of red hair bobbing, of Gaara’s pink mouth and hollow cheeks. 

Gaara keeps pulling back to wet his lips again, to damp down the dry skin and keep the slide smooth. The slick sound of him licking his own mouth is filthy, somehow more explicit than the sight of Lee’s cock disappearing into his throat. Just a few moments of it is too much; Lee’s eyes close and he drifts, suspended in an ocean of heat and sensation. He’s getting close, sparks rising in waves at the base of his dick, threatening to spill over.

Then Gaara pulls back with a wet pop. 

The chill of the room’s air is startling. 

“Can I touch you?” Gaara’s gravel-low voice has been scraped even lower by the friction of Lee’s dick. Lee’s whole body throbs at the thought. 

“I—what? Yes?” What does Gaara think they’ve been doing just now, if not touching?

But then Gaara’s ripping his own shorts off, spitting loudly into his palm, wrapping a slick fist around them both and— _ohhh_. 

Lee shudders. 

Gaara’s small fingers can’t quite touch around the girth of the two of them at once. He’s much closer now, warm body hovering close over Lee’s. His eyes are narrowed just to slits, his cheeks as pink as his lips, as his taut little nipples, as the head of his dick that pops up from between the slick tunnel of his fingers and drags against Lee’s. 

Gaara makes a few slow, awkward jerking motions of his fist. His knuckles bump Lee’s stomach and interrupt the progress of his strokes. The rhythm is thrown, uneven. 

He shifts his weight to the left to get more distance, but then he winces. His expression draws tight with pained frustration. A hiss escapes his teeth. 

That’s not a noise of pleasure. He’s putting weight on his wounded hand to try to balance. 

“Don’t hurt yourself—!” 

Lee knocks Gaara’s hand away from them both; Gaara’s weight rebalances immediately onto his uninjured hand, giving them both some breathing room. 

Lee reaches down and takes them both in hand, strokes them once. 

It’s familiar and unfamiliar all at the same time. The texture of his own calloused palm is uninspiring, but the heat and pressure of Gaara’s dick twitching against his and the crumpled, helpless expression of his face are revelatory. 

“Stop that.” Gaara nips at the juncture of Lee’s shoulder, falling down onto one elbow so he can grab Lee’s wrist in his good hand and bear it back to the bed once more. 

They’re pressed together now from chest to hip, sweat slick between them. Gaara stares Lee down challengingly, his chest heaving. “You’re not supposed to be doing that.”

“Well, what do you want us to do?” Lee wraps his right arm—the one that Gaara can’t stop him from moving—around Gaara’s waist. “I know you don’t want to think about your injuries, but I won’t let you hurt yourself worse.”

Gaara stills for a moment in thought. Then he ruts his hips down once, experimental. 

“ _Oh_.” Lee’s hand scrabbles for purchase in the small of Gaara’s back and ends up fumbling at the curve of his backside. 

Gaara does it again, twice, a third time. His muscles flex beneath Lee’s palm. Then with a sinuous motion, he rubs himself fully against Lee’s body with just the slightest pressure. His dick slides slick against Lee’s balls and up along his shaft.

“Ha-ahhh.” Lee’s hips twitch. 

“There?” Gaara thrusts against him once more with a roll of damp, heated skin.

“Yes, there, just there, don’t stop.” Lee’s babbling, his head thrashing against the pillows, but he doesn’t care. 

Gaara’s rhythm is slow and punishing, slick and inexorable. He refuses to alter his steady pace no matter how frantically Lee claws at the mattress, no matter how Lee’s toes clench in the sheets. They move like a single creature, heaving against each other with heated, shared breath. They’re impossibly close, and neither of them shuts their eyes. Lee feels himself burning alive in the sparking heat of Gaara’s stare. 

Gaara bites Lee’s lip when he comes. 

It spurts hot against Lee’s stomach, makes the slowing slide of Gaara grinding against him all the filthier, all the easier. Gaara’s eyelids flutter shut finally on a downstroke, and Lee notices how dark his eyelashes are, how long they are, hidden against the bruised circles of his eyes.

Lee follows him over the edge with a whimper. 

Gaara flops down on top of him moments later, heedless of the mess and the sweat of their bodies. He kisses the underside of Lee’s jaw. His chakra settles over them like a blanket, warm and contented. 

“Are you in any pain?” 

“Hmm?” Lee feels nothing but a low-simmering pleasure, soft-edged and languorous. He blinks slowly at the ceiling. His skin feels vaguely electric, tingly but not unpleasantly so. It’s nothing like the aftereffects of the shameful times he’s gripped himself under the sheets, willing Gaara’s face from his mind. 

Gaara sits up a little bit, eyes sharpening. “Do you need your medicine?” 

Lee grabs the back of Gaara’s head and tucks him back against his chest. 

“No,” he mumbles, “no, I’m fine. Just stay with me.”

* * *


	5. Chapter 5

* * *

Lee wakes up acutely aware of his need for a shave. 

His facial hair is slow-growing, but he was in the hospital for so long that his stubble’s grown in thick and coarse. Gaara has rolled off his stomach at some point during their nap, and now he’s curled against Lee’s side like a slumbering animal, all his limbs tucked in. 

Lee scratches his stomach and grimaces at the flakes of dried gunk that shed beneath his nails. 

They’ll need another shower. Did Gaara use both their water rations earlier? Does the Kazekage even have water rations? Knowing Gaara, he’d probably adhere to them even if he didn’t have to, loyal to his country to a fault. 

Gaara doesn’t stir as Lee rises and pulls his pants on. He’s still blanketed by his somnolent chakra, which seems to purr like a cat just beneath the edge of hearing. 

There’s no razor beside the little washbasin in the corner, and no hand towel either. Lee wets the corner of his t-shirt and uses it to wipe away the worst of the mess on his chest and stomach. There’s more of it than he remembers. 

Lee pores over the limited arrangement of supplies around the edge of the basin: a thinning bar of unscented soap, a comb tangled with a scant few red hairs, a toothbrush with its bristles in horrific condition, a tube of the sharp-tasting Sunan toothpaste Lee still hasn’t been able to get used to, which is designed to be brushed on waterlessly and swallowed instead of spat out. 

He wonders how Gaara shaves. Lee has seen him sharpen his sand into blades, so perhaps he uses the sand for this task, benefited by both the practice with control and by the inherent frugality of such a thing. Or … Lee recalls Gaara’s torso rubbing along his with a flush. Gaara’s hair is very sparse and very fine everywhere but his head. He hardly seemed to have any body hair at all. Perhaps he has no need to shave.

Luckily Lee has a razor in his pack, and his t-shirt will need to be washed anyway, so he can use it to wipe his face. He lathers his face with the powder they sell at the Sunan market to soften hair and make it stand on end, then tilts his chin and raises the razor to his throat. 

Something grabs his hand and pulls it into the air. 

He looks up. 

The sand is peeling his fingers back from the razor’s handle, formed like a fist. 

On the bed behind him, Gaara is sitting up and rubbing his eyes muzzily.

“Gaara-kun, please put me down.”

Gaara smacks his lips once, loudly. It takes a moment for his gaze to focus on Lee.

“I’m not doing that,” he says.

“Then what on earth is happening?” 

The sand wrests the razor free of Lee’s grasp. It hits the ground with a ring of metal on stone.

Gaara draws a sharp breath. “Oh. I see.”

“What?”

Gaara climbs to his feet and crosses the room to stand just behind Lee. He brings the sheet from the bed with him, wrapped around his shoulders like a cloak. Their eyes meet in the warped surface of the tin mirror. 

“It’s because my heart is in you now,” Gaara says softly. “Mother’s spirit wants to protect it.”

“Well, that’s very kind of her—” Lee stoops to grab the razor from the floor only for the sand to slap down on top of it, hissing. “—but she is rather in the way of my hygiene routine.”

“She doesn’t like knives.”

Lee tries dodging past the sand to no avail. 

“Why not?” he pants, giving up and standing once more, hands braced on either side of the basin. “She knows you’re a shinobi, doesn’t she?”

Gaara just hums idly. He goes up on his tiptoes and rests his chin on Lee’s shoulder. His hand snakes around Lee’s waist and palms at his stomach. His reflection still looks exhausted, eyes sinking closed even as they’re standing there. 

“I can’t just not shave!” Lee says a bit desperately. “That’s not even a knife; it’s a razor!”

Gaara shrugs, tugging Lee backwards into him. “Deal with it later,” he mumbles. He rubs his face against Lee’s stubbly cheek and kisses it. “Come back to bed.”

“But I feel disgusting.”

Gaara tenses at that. Lee can feel Gaara’s heartbeat against his spine, how it falters. 

“Not—not because of what we did!” he hastens to correct. “That part was, um, very enjoyable. I just don’t like having facial hair. It makes me look ridiculous.”

“I don’t mind it.” Gaara’s voice is a warm burr against the knob of Lee’s spine. “I think it makes you look roguish.”

Lee hesitates then, glancing at himself in the mirror. 

No, definitely not. Gaara must be blinded by affection. 

“We should get cleaned up,” Lee insists. “I’m sure your bandages are due for a change, too.”

He lunges for his razor once more. The sand knocks it out of his grasp. It goes spinning across the floor and wedges, blade-first, in the door.

He turns to the gourd. “Excuse me!” he calls. “Um—” He cranes his head back to whisper to Gaara, “What was your mother’s name?”

“Karura.”

“Karura-san. I appreciate your trying to help, but I don’t need this! I promise I can look after myself. I’m not going to get hurt.”

Gaara and the gourd both seem to eye him dubiously at that statement. 

“Not while I’m shaving, anyway,” he amends. 

Gaara wraps his arm tighter around Lee’s belly. “You should be lying down,” he murmurs. “I can clean us up later. They’re not expecting me back in the office for another few hours.”

Lee stands firm until the sand nips at his heels. 

He lets Gaara drag him back to the bed, though not without grumbling. The sand slithers to the door and dislodges the razor, depositing it on the back of the basin before it returns to the gourd, seemingly placated. 

Gaara lays the sheet over Lee and bends down to grab his shorts from the floor. He examines their stained front critically for a moment, then tugs them on anyway.

“You must be hungry. I’ll get us some food.”

Lee grabs at his shorts’ hems and tugs Gaara back until his knees bump the mattress.

“I’m not hungry,” he says, though what he really means is, _You still look tired_. “Stay here?” 

Gaara doesn’t seem to think on it long before he’s climbing under the sheet and wrapping himself around Lee, one arm and one leg thrown over Lee’s body. The tiny pores of the gauze wrapped around his hand snag in Lee’s chest hair as he makes himself comfortable. 

He feathers kisses against Lee’s shoulder, so light they’re almost ticklish. The blood rises to the surface of Lee’s skin with a creeping sense of interest. Gaara is terribly warm, and he said they have _hours_. 

Then Lee’s eyes land on the gourd, hanging inert by the door.

“Wait.” He grips the back of Gaara’s head hard. “If the sand is your mother’s spirit, does that mean she saw—?”

Gaara’s eyelashes flutter against Lee’s skin when he rolls his eyes. “It’s sand, Lee. It doesn’t have eyes.”

But Lee has watched Gaara use his Third Eye jutsu on more than one occasion. The sand may not have eyes, but that doesn’t mean it can’t _see_. After all, it knew he was holding a razor while Gaara was still asleep.

“I would still be more comfortable, if we’re going to do, um, _that_ —”

Gaara sighs and, with a flick of his wrist, banishes the sand under the door and out into the hall.

“Good?” He props himself up just enough on his uninjured hand to look Lee in the eye. 

“Yes, thank you.”

“Good.” Gaara leans down and kisses Lee wetly, all tongue and lip. “Now rest.”

Lee lays back against the shapeless, scratchy pillows as Gaara trails kisses down his neck and draws circles with his fingertips on Lee’s arm.

Gaara’s shifting against his hip, already stirring again. Lee gropes for his backside and Gaara nips his collarbone. 

“Be still. You’re recovering. The doctor said you need a week to recuperate.” 

“I was hoping for more like three days,” Lee admits.

Gaara licks the mark his teeth have left on the skin of Lee’s chest, scolding. “Out of the question. You won’t leave this house for a full week, and after that ...”

He trails off. He presses another kiss to Lee’s chest, then a third. 

“After that, you can decide.” He doesn’t sound happy about it. 

Lee looks down at that head of red hair, and he thinks about promises, about want and about love. He isn’t sure how he’ll manage the sand’s doting on top of Gaara’s, but he’s suddenly sure of one thing. 

He pulls Gaara’s face up to his own. Gaara gives him a rather grumpy look for disrupting the chain of kisses he’s been stringing along the underside of Lee’s pectoral muscle. 

“I think ...” Lee whispers against Gaara’s pink and healing lips. “I want to stay.”

“You’re serious.” Gaara almost pulls back, but Lee holds him close. “Permanently?”

“Yes.” It gets caught between their mouths like a shared laugh. “Permanently. Forever.”

Gaara’s pupils blow wide, swallowing up his moth-wing irises. “I want that too.”

He crashes his mouth into Lee’s, and then neither of them say anything else for quite a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to come yell at me on Tumblr [@ghoste-catte](https://ghoste-catte.tumblr.com)!


End file.
